During the past several years, television viewing habits have been rapidly changing in response to advances in technology, and to increased availability of viewing content. Many people are now using digital video recorders to view television programs and/or other visual content. A digital video recorder (DVR) is an electronic device that records television programs to a hard disc and/or other data store in a digital format. The digital video recorder allows a user to view a recorded program at a later time, and in many cases allows the user to pause live television, to replay interesting scenes, and otherwise manipulate recorded programs.
Current digital video recording devices typically provide that a user can program a DVR to record programs which have been selected by the user. Unfortunately, the user cannot record an unlimited number of programs at any one time due to various recording resource limitations.
These recording resource limitations include constraints such as the number of tuners in a DVR, and/or the amount of bandwidth available from an IP-based content delivery system. For example, if a DVR has two tuners, a user can only watch and/or record two programs at the same time. Therefore, if the user is recording two programs during a time period, and wants to record a third program during the same time period that two other programs are being recorded, a recording conflict will occur since there are not enough tuners available to satisfy this request.
Resolving problems which are related to recording resource limitations can be difficult for a user, especially when the problem involves several different programs which have recording times that overlap in various possible recording combinations of the several different programs.